We’ve long known that reading long blocks of text can lead to wandering minds and lower retention. It’s better to break up explanatory text with images, especially ones that summarize main points. This allows students to see the big picture, and the visual analog to
Student success in online course discussion assignments depends on not only understanding the learning material but also developing fundamental academic skills needed for future course success. While online instructors often create videos focused on course content, and institutions might provide general skill-building resources or access
Instructors in face-to-face courses can roughly gauge how well students understand the material by facial expressions and audience response systems. This immediate and informal feedback enables them to adjust their teaching in real-time. But this is not the case in asynchronous courses. Students have to
Virtual simulations are an exceptional way for online students to get experience applying what they have learned to real-life situations. My colleagues and I created 20-minute virtual simulations that had our online students treat patients for cancer and end-stage liver failure, perform a liver
Interleaving is the process of alternating between concepts during learning by periodically returning to earlier ones. Studies have shown that interleaving content promotes retention (Richland et al., 2005; Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer et al., 2015). Rohrer suggests that this is because interleaving helps students distinguish between
Online courses present unique challenges for both students and faculty. We’ve been teaching and learning in person for millennia, and we know a lot about how to do it well. The same is not true for online education. This modality has existed in its current
Swapna Kumar, Florence Martin, Kiran Budhrani, and Albert Ritzhaupt (2019) recently released the results of a study of the practices of online teachers who had won awards from one of three professional organizations. These practices, summarized below, can serve as guides for all online teachers.
Most higher education institutions have put their classes online for the remainder of the term. Higher education is well positioned to take classes online because so much of teaching in higher education is lecture driven rather than reliant on one-on-one interactions as in the K–12
Educational research has established that learning is more effective when it combines visual and audio, known as the Modality Effect (Reiser & Dempsey, 2012). This combination reduces cognitive load, which allows the learner to retain information more effectively. We decided to create educational videos for
There is an unfortunate tendency among higher education publications to measure the quality of online education by surveying faculty on whether they think online education is as good as face-to-face learning. But do these surveys ask whether the faculty answering have actually taught an online
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